An
artists interpretation - The
first public demonstration of anesthesia

Although depictions
of the world-famous 1846 ether operation abound, perhaps none have
received such attention as that completed by Robert Hinkley in 1893.
According to a 1960 article in The New England Journal of Medicine,
Hinkley, an American portrait painter who studied at the Paris Ecole
des Beaux Arts, in 1882 began his painting of the ether demonstration
as a speculative work and took 11 years to complete it. The painting
lay unwanted in his studio until 1903, when it was accepted by the
Boston Medical Library. From that point on, it received a great
deal of attention, much of it unfavorable.

The
Bigelow family was rumored to have objected strenuously to the depiction
of family scion Henry J. Bigelow, MD, who is shown with his hands
clutched to his chest and grim face averted from the operation,
a notable exception to the rapt gazes of others depicted. More important,
critics soon pointed to the works historical inaccuracy. J.
Mason Warren, MD; George Hayward, MD; and A. Lawrence Pierson, MD,
all MGH staff members and prominent physicians of the day, are shown
huddled around the operating chair. All three testified before a
Congressional committee in 1849 that they had been absent from the
Oct. 16, 1846 demonstration. Additionally, some of the spectators
shown in Hinkleys gallery later were proven to have been elsewhere
on the day of the historic surgery.

In his defense, some
art historians posit that Hinkley intended the painting to serve
not as a historical representation but as a composite of the most
distinguished medical professionals of the day and that he chose
the eras most notable medical discovery  the use of
ether to achieve painless surgery  as a device to unify his
allegory. The Hinkley painting today hangs in the Francis A. Countway
Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.